Aide to Afghanistan's president says Britain's secret service brought impostor to top-level peace talks.
LONDON — A senior Afghan official has blamed the British secret service for bringing a Taliban impostor to take part in top-level peace talks with the Afghan government, according to reports Friday.
The reports in U.S. and British newspapers follow the revelation that a man leading the Taliban side of peace talks with the Afghan government was impersonating former Taliban Cabinet minister Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour.
The Washington Post quoted Mohammad Omar Daudzai, Afghan President Hamid Karzai's chief of staff, as saying that British authorities brought the man to meet with Karzai in July or August. Karzai has denied meeting with Mansour.
British Prime Minister David Cameron's office and Britain's Foreign Office declined comment on the reports Friday.
Daudzai was quoted as saying that an Afghan who participated in the meetings knew the man wasn't Mansour. Afghan intelligence later found that the impostor was a shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta, he said.
"International partners should not get excited so quickly with those kinds of things," Daudzai was quoted as saying, adding that the incident shows that the Afghan peace talks should be "Afghan-led and fully Afghanized."
source: http://www.statesman.com
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